St Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves Analysis

The story “St, Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” by author Karen Russell is a story a pack of girls (raised by wolves) that are taken out of the woods and into a home to make them into proper humans. The main character, Claudette develops throughout this story and reacts in different ways to the rehabilitation. The nuns training them are following the “Jesuit Handbook for Lycanthropic Culture Shock” and the different epigraphs in the story are based off of this book, and the epigraphs predict how they will react to the rehabilitations in each section. In every section, Claudette reacts to the training as predicted, and this develops her as a functioning human throughout the story. The stage one epigraph states “The initial period is one in which everything is new, exciting and interesting…it is fun for your students to explore” (Russell, 237). Claudette and the rest of the pack do have a fun and interesting time at St. Lucy’s in the beginning, as they had just arrived out of the woods into a new culture. They aren’t having normal human fun as one would think, though, as they were “all hair and snarl and floor-thumping joy” (Russell, 237). They haven’t developed at all yet, so they are wolves in a human society, and this develops Claudette by helping her get used to the new environment as a wolf. It gives her one
Claudette becomes more concerned about herself than the success of the rest of the pack. The character of Mirabella is further developed as someone who is unable to adapt and the rest of the pack avoid because she is a temptation. Claudette says that “by stage three [she] wanted her gone” (Russell, 245). She has given up on another member of the pack for her own well-being. She’s thinking of herself, developing her as a character that does what she needs to do in order to